The world is on fire. The entire west coast is burning
so hot that the sky over Victoria is thick and jaundiced with smoke. You can
almost smell it. The photo I took on the weekend looks like it was tinted
sepia. It wasn’t.
It’s unsettling, the colour of chaos. BC is burning in
some areas, flash-flooding in others. If only we could direct the water toward
the fire sites, one might find some divine providence in it all. This early in
the season and the wildfire budget (how the heck can you budget for disaster?)
is already exhausted. The fire crews on the ground and finance folks waiting to
pay the bills are or will soon be equally so.
The glorious spring we enjoyed has morphed into the
summer from hell. Drought conditions create rock-hard soil so when the
rainstorms come, the water bounces off the ground and rushes straight through
people’s basements. Intense dry lightning sparks new forest fires almost daily.
Rising night winds whip the flames to the point where they create their own wind
and start crowning—that’s jumping from treetop to treetop, folks—and the dry
brush underfoot, the wreckage from pine beetle infestation and heedless
foresting practices, ignites to meet in the middle.
It’s not just in BC, either. If the prairies aren’t
battling tornadoes and thunderheads with hail the size of golf balls, they’re
on fire too. Fire crews in the US are fighting as hard as ours to hold off
hungry flames with yummy homes and vacation cottages in their sights.
Hundreds—thousands?—of people are evacuated with a half-hour’s notice and
nothing but what they can stuff into their cars. Lives may not be lost, but
they could be irrevocably changed.
I heard that a little earthquake recently rattled Nova
Scotia (?!) I’m sitting in a subduction zone where, when that one plate shifts,
Abbotsford will become waterfront property, and I’m getting a little nervous.
“Mother Earth is waking up,” Ter said the other day, “and she is pissed.”
Her comment got me thinking. If Mother Earth had been
Father Earth instead, would we have treated her with more respect?
I went up island yesterday, and you could smell the fire from Langford to Nanaimo.....from Duncan north, fine ash was falling like a light snow fall......
ReplyDeleteOh, yikes. Ashfall? We couldn't smell anything yesterday, but this morning it smelled like winter woodsmoke, and Ter's been coughing from it. I can't imagine what it's like in the actual fire zones.
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